✨ AWS Tip of the Week

This week, AWS announced two simple but powerful updates to the EC2 services—you can now release a public IP address from an EC2 instance and protect AMIs from accidental deletion.

If you listen to the podcast, you know I often call these updates ‘Quality of Life updates.’ They aren’t flashy, but they help you run and maintain your applications running on AWS.

Let’s first discuss the ability to remove public IP addresses from your EC2 instances. Until this update, if you launched an EC2 instance and assigned it a public IP address (not an elastic IP), you could not remove the IP address unless you terminated the instance itself - not ideal.

The update is significant for two reasons. First, AWS now charges for public IPv4 addresses. Therefore, removing public IP addresses without redeploying your instances is a fantastic cost-saving feature. Second, by removing public IP addresses from your resources, you’re improving the security of your application. Win-win!

The other update I want to mention is protecting your EC2 AMIs. If you’re not familiar with AMIs (Amazon Machine Images), they are used to launch one (or more) EC2 instances. Because of this, they are super important, but until now, there has been no easy way to protect them from being accidentally deleted (deregistered). Yes, AWS has offered the recycle bin for a while now, but if your AMIs are used by an EC2 autoscaling group, you will still have issues if an AMI is deregistered and put in the recycle bin.

As of last week, you can now mark an AMI as ‘protected.’ This provides an additional layer of protection and ensures that if you (or someone else) try to delete an AMI, they have to go through an extra step—it’s like the Windows pop-up asking you “if you’re sure…”

That’s it for this week, folks. Get out there and build secure and cost-effective solutions!

📚 Always Be Learning

Here are a few videos about AWS compute services.

• Smart Savings: Amazon EC2 cost-optimization strategies
• Best practices for serverless developers

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🎧 Podcast: AWS Q Services, Research Paper Concerns, and Doctor’s AI Assistant

In this episode of Talking Cloud, hosts discuss their weekly movie recommendations, focusing on He-Man Masters of the Universe (1987), the Great British Bake Off, and the IT Crowd.

The episode shifts to a deep dive into the latest AWS updates, particularly around Q business, its general availability (GA), and the new Q apps feature. They also explore the utility of Amazon Q in various business aspects and touch upon the latest developments in AI, such as Anthropic’s new iPhone app.

Additionally, they highlight a transformative use of AI in healthcare, specifically how AI transcription tools greatly assist Ontario doctors with administrative tasks, potentially saving a doctor’s career by reducing administrative workload.